"Yesterday my desktop died, and so I went ahead and got a brand new Windows 8 laptop. It's always been my feeling that as years go on, user experience has been going down for people who use a computer and the Internet, because of decisions all companies make that are clearly anti-user, either because they think they know best, or in many cases, for financial gains. But from spending all night reinstalling everything and customizing the laptop, I realized just how bad it has become." Probably the biggest reason to go Mac or Linux. Such a shame Microsoft found it more important to pressure OEMs into silly Secure Boot nonsense instead of doing something about the anti-user crapware disaster. Goes to show who Microsoft cares about. Hint: it ain't you.

I didn't want to post here anything, really, because I don't care about Windows nor OSX systems, but I see a quite dangerous tendency here in comments. It can be described as "whoa, this crap was here almost from the start. IT is full of crap. Where's the problem? [it is normal]".

First of all - this is not true. In the beginning there was only open and free [of charge] software, available for huge computers. Source code was shared between places and people, usually academics and - later - hobbyists. This software had no crap inside. There was no bundles in terms of crap. It was only later that few companies started to charge people for the software they added to their hardware+software bundles.

Secondly - the fact that we got this crap on a market today doesn't mean it is *normal* in any way. It is not normal, it destroys your freedoms, privacy and it makes your life harder and less personal.
Of course you can accept it, but do it on your own. You don't have to care about your own freedoms and your own privacy. Heck, you can even think [your!] privacy is dead. However, please don't expect everyone to accept this pathological situation. There are many individuals and groups who do not agree to this situation. The easiest possible solution is just to drop commercial software and switch to something else, but again: is it normal to be forced to do so? no, it certainly isn't. It's no choice when someone tells you "take it or leave it", or if someone threatens you with the gun pointed at your head "do it or you're gonna die". This is NOT a choice. You are forced to drop it, the company itself doesn't give you other option. This is bad, unfair and ugly. Yeah, companies are companies and "they can do whatever they want to do". But do we really want them to do whatever they want? they are realising their freedoms "to do whatever they want" [to get more money out of our pockets]. But where's our freedom from their actions? where's our freedom to do what we need and want to do? do we have any choice? do we really want to be left divided and helpless?
If you do, then ok, go ahead and play according to the bad and harmful rules. Others will not do it.

First of all - this is not true. In the beginning there was only open and free [of charge] software, available for huge computers.

That's not true, IBM was selling proprietary software from the beginning. Please don't try to push that GPL revisionist history here.

It is not normal, it destroys your freedoms, privacy and it makes your life harder and less personal.

Disregarding the GPL newspeak definition of "freedom" there is a major upside to crapware which is that is lowers the entry price of computers. Have OEMs gone to far? Yes but I'm fine with non-invasive crapware like installed programs that don't run in the background.

The easiest possible solution is just to drop commercial software and switch to something else, but again: is it normal to be forced to do so?

That is a unrealistic solution that doesn't take into account the billions of dollars worth of proprietary software for which there is no free alternative.

GPL? come on ... have you ever heard of BSD? do you even know the history of IT?

PDPs used by the academics was there BEFORE personal computing era. I'm talking about this code being shared freely between various academic places. Don't tell me you didn't know that. Do you really think it's all about money? do you think it was all pushed there only for money? read about Thompson and Ritchie. You'll see it was actually against mainstream first. It was for fun, joy, out of curiosity, to build something news, not for money at all. It is called research. Then it's eventually pushed to the folks from various corporations. At least that's how it worked then. Now it may be all about money, unfortunately. That's probobly why we have so much crap out there.

@werecatf - you see, that was not being said literally, but it's the meaning you can read out of people's comments. "Get over it, it's normal, accept it, you don't have any choice anyway. Shut up and stop whining".

I haven't seen anyone in the comments yet say it's "normal" or "acceptable," so I don't know who your rant is aimed at.

Yeah, just because it's been going on for 10+ years doesn't mean it's normal or acceptable. The other option is to only buy machines with the 'vanilla' install disc, and that solves the problem.

As for the rest of your rant, the day that free software does everything that commercial software does for me, and does it just as well is the day I switch. Until that day comes though, all you Freetards cant take your 'freedom' and shove it up your ass.